Wednesday 2 September 2009

Testing Transport Routes and Burglary

I have recently run some tests with transport routes in my burglary simulation and have some nice results. The image shows what happens when a simulated burglar has to walk around (left) and when they're given a access to public transport (right). These are purely hypothetical simulations, but it shows some of the potential of the model.
















When the agent has to walk between their friend's house, drug dealer and their home, they are able to explore more of the city on the way. This gives them a much greater knowledge of the area when they need to commit a burglary.

When they use public transport to travel, on the other hand, they do not explore the surrounding area as they would do if they were walking. Therefore the burglaries are much more clustered around their anchor points (home address, friend's house and drug dealer).

Although this is a simple result I'm hoping that this type of experiment will be very useful when trying to predict real burglary rates.